RealNetworks
Encyclopedia
RealNetworks, Inc. is a provider of Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...

 delivery software and services based in Downtown
Downtown Seattle
Downtown is the central business district of Seattle, Washington. It is fairly compact compared to other city centers on the West Coast because of its geographical situation: hemmed in on the north and east by hills, on the west by the Elliott Bay, and on the south by reclaimed land that was once...

 Seattle, Washington
Seattle, Washington
Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...

, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. The company is the creator of RealAudio
RealAudio
RealAudio is a proprietary audio format developed by RealNetworks and first released in April 1995. It uses a variety of audio codecs, ranging from low-bitrate formats that can be used over dialup modems, to high-fidelity formats for music. It can also be used as a streaming audio format, that is...

, a compressed audio format; RealVideo
RealVideo
RealVideo is a suite of proprietary video compression formats developed by RealNetworks – the specific format changes with the version. It was first released in 1997 and is at version 10. RealVideo is supported on many platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, and several mobile...

, a compressed video format; RealPlayer
RealPlayer
RealPlayer is a cross-platform media player by RealNetworks that plays a number of multimedia formats including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, and multiple versions of proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats.-History:...

, a media player; RealDownloader
RealDownloader
RealDownloader is a freemium download manager by RealNetworks that downloads embedded Internet videos in multiple formats including MOV and FLV from sites such as Youtube, CollegeHumor, Facebook, Funny or Die and Dailymotion. This software utility lets users share downloaded videos on social...

, a download manager; Unifi, a personal cloud media service; Rinse, a digital music library cleanup tool; and Helix, technology for delivering digital media to PCs, mobile phone and emerging devices. The company also manages subscription-based online entertainment services including SuperPass and GameHouse
GameHouse
GameHouse is a casual game developer, publisher, digital video game distributor, and portal, based in Seattle, Washington, United States-History:...

 RealNetworks’ software as a service group also provides mobile entertainment and messaging services to mobile carriers.

History

RealNetworks (then known as Progressive Networks) was founded by ex-Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 executive Rob Glaser
Rob Glaser
Rob Glaser is the founder of RealNetworks which produces RealAudio, RealVideo, RealPlayer, and Helix, among other products and services...

 in 1995. The original goal of the company was to provide a distribution channel for politically progressive
Progressivism
Progressivism is an umbrella term for a political ideology advocating or favoring social, political, and economic reform or changes. Progressivism is often viewed by some conservatives, constitutionalists, and libertarians to be in opposition to conservative or reactionary ideologies.The...

 content. It evolved into a technology venture to leverage the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 as an alternative distribution medium for audio broadcasts. Progressive Networks became RealNetworks in September 1997.

RealNetworks were pioneers in the streaming media
Streaming media
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...

 markets and broadcast one of the earlier audio events over the Internet - a baseball game between the Yankees and Seattle Mariners - in 1995. They went on to launch the first streaming video technology in 1997. According to some accounts, by 2000, more than 85% of streaming content on the Internet was in the Real format.

Despite this success, problems arose because Real's primary business model depended upon the sale of servers, and Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 and Apple were giving those products away. As servers from Microsoft and Apple became more capable, Real's server sales inevitably eroded.

Music store

In August 2003, RealNetworks acquired Listen.com's Rhapsody music service, and renamed it RealRhapsody
Rhapsody (online music service)
Rhapsody is an online music store subscription service, launched in December 2001, and available in the United States only. On April 6, 2010, Rhapsody officially declared its independence from RealNetworks. Downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by Helix, Rhapsody's version...

(which includes Rhapsody Radish
Rhapsody Radish
The Rhapsody Radish is a web based music playlist archive that works in conjunction with RealNetworks Rhapsody streaming music service. The site is published in a blog format with archived playlists that are organized by subject, situation, hits, cover songs and other categories...

). It offers streaming music downloads for a monthly fee. On April 6, 2010, Rhapsody was spun off from RealNetworks.

In January 2004, RealNetworks announced that they are creating RealPlayer Music Store, featuring DRM
Digital rights management
Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...

-restricted music in the AAC
Advanced Audio Coding
Advanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....

 file format. After some initial tries to push their own DRM scheme (named Helix DRM) onto all device manufacturers with the Creative Zen Xtra
Creative Zen
The Creative ZEN is a range of digital audio players and portable media players made by Creative Technology. The players evolved from the now-defunct NOMAD brand through the NOMAD Jukebox series...

 and the Sansa e200r as the only existing compliant devices, they sparked controversy by introducing a technology called Harmony that allowed their music to play on iPods as well as Microsoft Windows Media Audio
Windows Media Audio
Windows Media Audio is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs...

 DRM-equipped devices using a "wrapper" that would convert Helix DRM into the two other target DRM schemes.

The domain real.com attracted at least 67 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com
Compete.com
Compete.com is a web traffic analysis service of Compete, Inc. which operates in the United States and publishes the approximate number of global visitors to the top 1,000,000 web sites in the world...

 study.

Subscription services

In 2000, one of the initial products, the download manager
Download manager
A download manager is a computer program dedicated to the task of downloading possibly unrelated stand-alone files from the Internet for storage...

 RealDownload, was already used for pushing small software, such as games, to subscribers' computers. On top of the subscription for RealDownload and using its RealVideo streaming technology, a service called GoldPass, including unlimited access for video snippets from ABC
American Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

 and movie previews, was offered to registered users for a $10 a month fee. More content was added through deals with CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...

 for the reality show Big Brother and NBA
National Basketball Association
The National Basketball Association is the pre-eminent men's professional basketball league in North America. It consists of thirty franchised member clubs, of which twenty-nine are located in the United States and one in Canada...

 basketball.

After the dot-com crash, RealNetworks cut most of the resources. Some of the content was lost, some was limited to local markets (e.g., Ministry of Sound
Ministry of Sound
Ministry of Sound London, commonly referred to as simply Ministry of Sound or MoS, is a nightclub based in London, United Kingdom and an associated record label. It was ranked fourth in the 2010 DJ Magazine top 100 clubs poll 2010. As well as the nightclub in London, there is another in Egypt and...

 was available only to UK subscribers). With the increase in broadband usage, RealNetworks started offering live broadcasts of CNN International, BBC World, Al-Jazeera etc., separately for prices between $6 and $12, or bundled in the SuperPass for about $35 a month depending on the market. Between 2003 and 2006, SuperPass included, for European subscribers, unlimited access to UEFA Champions League
UEFA Champions League
The UEFA Champions League, known simply the Champions League and originally known as the European Champion Clubs' Cup or European Cup, is an annual international club football competition organised by the Union of European Football Associations since 1955 for the top football clubs in Europe. It...

 full-length game recordings.

RealNetworks Vs. StreamBox

On January 20, 2000, RealNetworks, Inc. filed an injunction against Streambox, Inc. regarding the aforementioned company's product designed to convert Real Audio (.rm) formatted files to other formats.

RealDVD

On September 30, 2008, RealNetworks launched a new product called RealDVD. The software allows any user to save a copy of a DVD movie they own. The company was later found to have violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization . It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to...

 and RealNetworks' contract with the DVD CCA, as the software also allowed anyone to save a movie they do not legally own. (See RealNetworks, Inc. v. DVD Copy Control Association, Inc.
RealNetworks, Inc. v. DVD Copy Control Association, Inc.
RealNetworks, Inc. v. DVD Copy Control Association, Inc., 641 F. Supp. 2d 913 , is a United States District Court case involving RealNetworks, the movie studios and DVD Copy Control Association regarding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims on the manufacturing and distribution of RealDVD,...

). The product's distribution was barred by a court injunction.

Real Alternative

Real Alternative is a discontinued software bundle that allows users to play RealMedia
RealMedia
RealMedia is a proprietary multimedia container format created by RealNetworks. Its extension is ".rm". It is typically used in conjunction with RealVideo and RealAudio and is used for streaming content over the Internet....

 files without installing RealPlayer. The last version, 2.02, was released on February 19, 2010. It included Media Player Classic
Media Player Classic
Media Player Classic is a compact media player for 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows. The application mimics the look and feel of the old, lightweight Windows Media Player 6.4 but integrates most options and features found in modern media players...

.

Beginning in 2010, RealNetworks sued Hilbrand Edskes, a 26-year old Dutch webmaster for having inserted hyperlink
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...

s to Real Alternative on his website www.codecpack.nl. RealNetworks alleges that Real Alternative is a reverse engineered package. Meanwhile, Download.com
Download.com
Download.com is an Internet download directory website, launched in 1996 as a part of CNET. Originally, the domain was download.com.com. The domain download.com attracted at least 113 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study....

 and FileHippo
FileHippo
FileHippo is an Internet download website that offers open source, freeware, and shareware programs for Windows. It does not accept user uploaded files...

 continue to host the software product, unchallenged.

Headquarters

RealNetworks has its headquarters in Downtown
Downtown Seattle
Downtown is the central business district of Seattle, Washington. It is fairly compact compared to other city centers on the West Coast because of its geographical situation: hemmed in on the north and east by hills, on the west by the Elliott Bay, and on the south by reclaimed land that was once...

 Seattle, Washington
Seattle, Washington
Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...

, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. The headquarters is located above Seattle's waterfront
Central Waterfront, Seattle
The Central Waterfront of Seattle, in the state of Washington, USA, is the most urbanized portion of the Elliott Bay shore. It runs from the Pioneer Square shore roughly northwest past Downtown Seattle and Belltown, ending at the Broad Street site of the Olympic Sculpture Park.The Central...

. In 2010 the company announced plans to sublease a portion of the headquarters.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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